Each year, the New Media Consortium brings together a team of experts to discuss trends in technology, especially as related to educational contexts.
From the NMC release:
On January 19, 2010, the New Media Consortium (NMC) and the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative (ELI) released the 2010 Horizon Report at the ELI Annual Meeting in Austin, Texas. The annual Horizon Report describes the continuing work of the NMC’s Horizon Project, a long-term research project that identifies and describes emerging technologies likely to have considerable impact on teaching, learning, and creative inquiry within higher education. The seventh edition in this annual series is again a collaboration between the NMC and ELI. Each year, the Horizon Report describes six areas of emerging technology that will have significant impact on campuses within three adoption horizons over the next one to five years.
This year’s report was released at the EDUCAUSE Learning Initiative conference in Austin, and includes some great things to explore:
- mobile computing – handheld and highly portable devices, able to connect to networks from anywhere
- open content – educational content shared freely, for use and reuse by others
- electronic books – paperless, digital books will finally become as useful as dead-trees versions
- augmented reality – using mobile technology and ubiquitous networking to provide realtime data to enhance interpretation of real places and scenarios
- gesture-based computing – using real-world gestures (waving, pointing, etc…) to control software and interact with others. Wii Tennis…
- visual data analysis – providing rich, interactive visualizations of complex, even realtime data
Grab your copy of the report, or view it online.
Scott Leslie was at the ELI conference, and interviewed several of the NMC board members who contributed to the report. Here’s his video of their conversations:
